Raising IT Awareness about Day-to-Day Problems for SMBs

How does one offer valuable information and raise awareness on the internet, without undermining their paid offerings as a service provider?

This is the story of a managed services provider and its efforts to raise IT awareness across a wide variety of topics - without paywalls and without biases.

Prioritizing Education

The Internet is the single biggest resource we humans have ever created. But the low barrier to entry that makes all of this possible, also means that the information shared on the internet is often incomplete, and in my cases, incorrect.

As a company with over a decade of experience managing IT systems, Our client was in a unique position where it understood the key problems that small-medium businesses faced and how they could be tackled.

About the Company

The company was started by Michael in 2010 after more than a decade working as an IT consultant and in the network security industry with companies like CIBC and HP. Three years later, April joined the team as Vice President to help pivot the company towards managed IT services and help target the non-tech audience.

In 2021, April reached out to Prakhar Singh of House of Brilliant Ideas to step up their efforts in IT awareness and inbound marketing.

The Challenge

By 2020, TUCU had realized that they may be leaving business on the table by not leveraging content marketing and by not focusing on organic traffic.

To fill these gaps, April decided to ramp up content marketing through a clear-cut strategy that focused on specific problems relevant to SMBs at the time.

She also wanted someone who could take the initiative and do things on their own — only needing her to sign off on the content strategy and turn out quality content at a consistent pace.

Deliverables

When we started this project, April was already in the process of A/B testing paid ads and decided it would be best to create monthly marketing campaigns with articles discussing the same problems and solutions. This way we could leverage the combined synergy of organic and paid channels.

We began this process through a few discovery meetings to explore the company’s experience dealing with IT challenges and how to best convey their expertise in solving these problems.

Content Strategy

Among the numerous things we and the client agreed upon was the need for a content strategy to give direction to our efforts and make sure it’s all well-planned out at least a month in advance.

Our partnership began right around the time the world went into global lockdown and businesses and employees were forced to find a new way to keep things going. This focus on remote work resulted in four articles, each written focusing on Canadian businesses and workers. We continued on this theme with a series of articles on best security practices for a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy for SMBs.

The next campaign focused on security frameworks. The company has a history of helping businesses manage compliance across a variety of industries and help them meet and pass vendor screenings based on regulatory requirements set by national and global security frameworks like NIST, PIPEDA, and so on.

Articles & Technical Guides

Despite the lockdown-driven topics of some articles, we did our best to write them in a way that they would stay relevant long after the end of the lockdown. More importantly, we anticipated that many companies would opt for a remote/hybrid work arrangement even after there was no obligation to do so.

The technical content around compliance and security frameworks was more naturally evergreen since these frameworks don’t change very often. But when they do change, an editor’s note about the change would make them relevant again.